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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the PublishPress Podcast. We talk with people who are using WordPress as it's designed as a world class publishing platform. I'm Steve Birch, and I'm here with Dan today. Hey,
Dan Knauss:Dan. Hey. I'm Dan Knauss from Multidots and yeah, this was a episode where we talked with Kyle Van Dusen who's I think quite well known in the WordPress community. If you are an agency, small agency owner, freelance developer, designer. He's been at it a long time with really organically grown community out of Facebook newsletters and many different channels and, we got into it with him today about what's the secret sauce and secret of his success with his publishing empire, which is is one of the one that's been quite healthy and good for the WordPress ecosystem for a long time.
Steve Burge:Kyle manages to produce hundreds of pieces of content. So far this year, we're in the March. I think he's already around 250 articles, ebooks, videos, webinars, mastermind groups. And so one of the key questions I had for him was, how does he keep on top of it all? If you've been around the WordPress community, you probably know Kyle and the admin bar.
Steve Burge:And so in this episode, we dive into exactly how he got started and how he keeps such a successful community on the rails. Hey, and welcome to the Published Press Podcast. Kyle, it's great to have you with us.
Kyle Van Deusen:I'm so excited to be here. I really appreciate you inviting me on.
Steve Burge:So, Kyle, you run the admin bar as people can see from your hat there. And you've been well, I guess we could call you a WordPress OG, original, foundational member. You've been around the WordPress community for quite some time. How did you get started? Where does the admin bar originate from?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. So me and a buddy actually connected right early when I started my first agency. We were both doing WordPress stuff. We connected through that, and our businesses started doing a whole lot better when we started, you know, having somebody to actually talk about our business with, how much we were charging, what kind of grief our clients were giving us, all those kinds of things. And we realized the more we had somebody to talk with us all about, we could kinda shortcut each other's mistakes and not make them ourselves and thought, well, maybe that would multiply if we had more people doing this.
Kyle Van Deusen:So the original idea was really just to get a handful of people together that we could, you know, improve our agency from, and that started in 2017. So here we are, you know, seven years later, and we have about 12,000 members inside of our community. And it's still the same ethos essentially. There's just a much bigger number of people in there now.
Steve Burge:So it's a therapy slash mastermind group slash chamber of commerce for WordPress agencies, essentially.
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. That's it. Most most of the people in of our in our community are either freelancers or agency owners. The vast majority of them use WordPress in their day to day life. Now there's a mix of all kinds of people in there.
Kyle Van Deusen:But most things we're talking about inside the Admin Bar community specifically are running your business related things more than they are the nuts and bolts of actually building websites.
Steve Burge:So is there a foundational piece to it? Is it the is it the Facebook group, or is it private community? What's the which piece of this is the the heart of the admin bar?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I would say, unfortunately, all of that is inside Facebook. And I I say that not because I don't like our Facebook community, but because Facebook is a rocky place to build your core around. I probably wouldn't do that in hindsight. But there's a lot of benefits to it.
Kyle Van Deusen:There's so many people already there, and people are already there for a multitude of reasons. So it's really easy for them to see notifications and be involved and all that kind of thing. Whereas it's harder to do that when you have a private community where people are just coming there for a singular thing. So it kinda started with that Facebook community. It would be hard or impossible at this point to get rid of it.
Kyle Van Deusen:So we're still chugging along and kinda dealing with whatever Facebook throws our way, which isn't always something we're welcoming with open arms.
Steve Burge:So you have the Facebook group, and that's where the 12,000 plus people interact with you. And then there are other like an octopus almost. There are lots of other arms to the admin bar as well. You have a a newsletter, a YouTube channel
Kyle Van Deusen:Mhmm.
Steve Burge:A private membership group. Am I missing other things?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. So we have it really started with our website. Of course, we publish content on there. So blogs and events and things like that go on the website, resources, products, that's ballooned over time. But we had the website since the very beginning, really.
Kyle Van Deusen:We started with doing a podcast. We haven't done that in several years now. We also were putting all those podcast episodes on YouTube, so the YouTube channel started. And then we started a mastermind, some mastermind groups. So there's five different mastermind groups that I've been running for about three years now.
Kyle Van Deusen:And then we have another private community that's, it's got about 500 members. It's more of like a Patreon style community, except we're just not using Patreon for it. But people pay a small fee every month and get access to exclusive content and private Slack community and things like that. So all that's just kind of organically grown over time. But when I have to draw it all out in a chart, it feels like a lot.
Steve Burge:It it feels like an octopus lately. We had Matt Menderes on the podcast a couple weeks ago, and I think he called it a what was the word then? Did he use multichannel or omnichannel? Yeah. He's pretty
Dan Knauss:he's pretty omnichannel.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Omnichannel.
Dan Knauss:So is Kyle. Yeah.
Steve Burge:Octopus. So is there I mean, a business question for you, and I hope you don't mind me asking this. Is there a piece of this that really drives the revenue that makes the admin bar a a sustainable business?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. So for for the majority of its life, it wasn't a sustainable business. It was something I did on the side, right, and ran my agency full time. Over the past, I'd say, year and a half or so, most of my time is focused on the admin bar now, and that's thanks to some of the products we've created. The products isn't a huge slice of that pie.
Kyle Van Deusen:The biggest piece of that pie is probably sponsorships from WordPress related communities, hosting companies, and things like that, and then the mastermind community, which is kind of a higher ticket item. So those those two things, the mastermind community and the sponsorships drive the majority of the revenue for for the business.
Dan Knauss:I speaking of Matt Madero, so we're on the WP minute Slack. I I noticed he shared, this past week that YouGurus, I I didn't even know they had been acquired by DigitalOcean and now now shut down. And I listened to Troy of our agency Mavericks, talking about that. He's he's someone who's been at this for a long time, but admin bar has a real weird different WordPress kind of organic, real people, self organized feeling almost is quite different. How would how would you describe your different, the differences in your model and and what you're doing compared to some of those others?
Kyle Van Deusen:I would love to tell you it's my master plan. But like everything I've done in my life, it's almost all happened by accident. I think the thing is there's a lot of communities where there's kind of the leader of the community who's on the stage, and they're, disseminating information to the crowd. Right? And the admin bar has just never been like that.
Kyle Van Deusen:It it was always set up for us. You know, we're just all in the trenches together figuring it out. Now I take on the leadership role because I manage the community, and it's my business essentially, but I've never been up on the stage professing to anyone. We're all just kinda in the trenches together. And because of that kind of vibe that that exists in the community, eventually, that kind of builds into a culture, and I don't have to put out that directive.
Kyle Van Deusen:That's just kinda how the group works at this point. So everybody, I think, feels a part of it and feels like they're contributing to it, but it's just a little bit of a different vibe than some of the other communities that are out there.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. It's a really cool thing. I've noticed that more recently just because some of the people who are more involved in the admin bar which I used to jump into for product concerns when I worked for on a security product. People are talking about it, wanna get in there and you've got our key audience. But the conversation level is so good and there's some people who are just contributing in your community and then I start seeing them around like Jen Harris now is doing a lot of stuff on her own and it feels like it's, yeah, this is kind of a nice incubator for WordPress.
Dan Knauss:That kind of the intention with some of the masterminds? Do you have just sort of happens. You've got kind of what Brian Nino calls the seniors where everyone is the sum is smarter than the any one individual.
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I mean, that that is definitely true. I mean, I I I have never been one that felt like I had it all figured out, and I don't even pretend like I have it all figured out. So I'm you know, I ask all the dumb questions I can because I can learn from all these smart people in our community. Certainly, lot of people way smarter than me inside of our community, and I'm so thankful that they share so much information.
Kyle Van Deusen:But, yeah, there's, you know, a a huge part of building, I guess, an audience or a presence online is just putting yourself out there. And there's been people in the community that have spent more time, answered more questions, lend a hand more often, and those people oftentimes end up coming with products and courses and all those kinds of things. And it's not something I necessarily planned out, like, going back to that. I never really planned any of that out, but it happens organically, and I think it's a it's a really awesome thing to see. And we've had people like Troy Glancy who's talked about Cloudflare forever.
Kyle Van Deusen:If you mentioned Cloudflare in our group, everybody will tag him. And eventually, he got it together and put together a course on Cloudflare, and we were able to promote that to the group and stuff like that. So all those things are really, really cool to see.
Steve Burge:So you've grown a a successful community, and there's a a public side, at least in the public public facing Facebook group, and a private side as well. You seem to be putting out an enormous amount of content to meet the needs of both groups. We mentioned newsletters, YouTube videos, blog posts. I think you do ebooks as well now. Then you're on those mastermind calls.
Steve Burge:How do you manage it? How do you how do you manage to create such a fire hose of content and point it at the people who are part of the MMR?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. It I I don't feel like I manage it very well. It manages me most days. In fact, we're just in preparation for this call, I went through. I'm like, I wonder how many pieces of content I've created this year.
Kyle Van Deusen:We're, you know, halfway through March or so. Yeah. Ended up being a 41 pieces of content, blog posts, newsletters, YouTube videos, mastermind meetings, all those kinds of things. None of them really short. I mean, we're not talking about, like, TikToks or anything.
Kyle Van Deusen:It's all pretty long form content, and it's incredible to, like, look at that number. I can't believe it. Now that's all in in thanks to the fact that I'm not having to create all that content myself. A few little things that have really helped out is getting some people to do guest posts. So we have a couple people that publish on our blog, a couple times a month.
Kyle Van Deusen:That helps out a ton. We've started creating some more user generated content type things. Like, I've been doing interviews this year, written interviews with people. So I have to write the interview questions. That doesn't take a whole lot of time.
Kyle Van Deusen:And somebody else is filling out all the answers to those. So those are big pieces of content that we can publish that don't take up a whole lot of my time. The the main part of my time is really I try to publish a YouTube video once a week, publish the newsletter every week. So those are kind of the big things. Blog posts whenever I can fit them in, and then our mastermind meetings are I have those five days a week.
Kyle Van Deusen:So those are, you know, an hour out of the day pretty much every day doing those. So it's a little bit of mix everything, but the biggest key for me in trying to manage all of it is I really like to have a schedule. That's the only way I can get things down. So I've tried to come up with, you know, our member interviews, those come out every Monday. So I just know on Monday that's gotta get done.
Kyle Van Deusen:We have an SEO article that comes out. Those come out every Tuesday. Right? So YouTube video comes out on Wednesday. And by creating a schedule for that, it's a whole lot easier to kinda stay on top of it.
Kyle Van Deusen:Sometimes to get ahead of it and actually have things scheduled in the queue. That's not all the time. Often, I'm publishing it the moment I finish it, but having a schedule definitely helps.
Dan Knauss:I noticed so even in your the setback you recently had in your your home plumbing disaster that ended up being part of your content was actually actually a pretty good analogy for dealing with, some difficult, client situations.
Kyle Van Deusen:Inspiration comes from everywhere, man. I'll tell you what. The my kids are, you know, one of the biggest sources of it because they're just learning so much and going through, you know, just all the things you go through growing up. So I will take inspiration from anywhere. Sometimes I really need it too.
Steve Burge:So for people that might not have seen that, we were originally gonna have this podcast recording with you, Kyle, I think just before the turn of the year. Yeah. Right. And you had a house. What's the word for it?
Steve Burge:Had a big leak. Flood, unfortunately. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:It flooded. Floor. Yeah. It was high up enough, so it did some it came on down, and it's the worst.
Steve Burge:Yeah. And so although it took two to three months or so to clean up, you did great you did get some good content out of it.
Kyle Van Deusen:That's true. I I will turn any kind of lemons into lemonade if I have the opportunity. But, yeah, I mean, it's it's interesting when you you know, we as business owners, we spend so much time operating the business and looking everything through the perspective of the business owner and seeing customers. But when we hire somebody, we get to see a business work from the opposite perspective. Right?
Kyle Van Deusen:So we get to see it from the customer end, and we get to evaluate how these businesses are operating and what their systems and processes are like. And, you know, I think we all deal with impostor syndrome, and then you deal with some contractor that takes two months to finish a leak, and you're like, man, I really do have my business together because this would have never happened on my watch. You know? So sometimes it's just a good reminder to have a bad experience and then say, okay. Well, I'm never gonna do that or put my customers through that in my business.
Steve Burge:So are you still running the agency as well as the admin bar? Is the agency part of the business still chugging along?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. So I have about 60 websites that I manage through care plans, keeping their websites up and running. I'm doing a lot less new full projects at this point. I think I did three last year, and that's opposed to when I was doing that full time full time, probably doing, you know, anywhere from 15 to 20 websites in a year. So I've cut that back a whole lot.
Kyle Van Deusen:So, thankfully, I get to be really picky about the projects I take on at this point. I have one development project going on right now. The management websites don't take up a whole lot of time most weeks. Sometimes it's a little bit more chaotic than others, but I I wanna still be in that business. Right?
Kyle Van Deusen:Because we're creating so much content for agency owners. I've just seen so many people make that transition from agency owner and content creator to just full time content creator, and they leave their agency behind. And they're not in the weeds. They're not living it anymore. And it's not malicious, I don't think, but they're just not living through those experiences.
Kyle Van Deusen:So for me, as long as I can keep both running, I wanna keep both going so I'm actually living through all the same things that our community is is living through on a day to day basis.
Dan Knauss:You also managed to accumulate quite a lot of good information about that whole audience you've got. I think you maybe about three years or so you've been running an annual survey and then sharing the data which I found really useful. I think Mailchimp has done something like that. I don't
Steve Burge:know if they'll keep it
Dan Knauss:up for agencies and freelancers. There's a great old agency in North Carolina called Newfangled that did that way back in the day. One of the first I recall gave you kind of a sense of how big the agency market is and agency and freelancer market. What inspired you to do that? Is that something you plan to keep going, and and what are the results of of sharing that kind of data?
Kyle Van Deusen:You knew I needed a kick in the butt today because I was supposed to get that done this month that I haven't heard yet. So behind schedule on it for the 2025 edition. But, yeah, we have done that three years in a row. The consequence of it has been there's a lot of companies that use that to kinda analyze the market in the in the sense you're talking about. Really, what I set it up for is just curiosity.
Kyle Van Deusen:How much are people charging? What tools are they using? What are they paying attention to? What's important to them? Just out of curiosity to see how that aligns with my business, how we all kind of align together, what we can learn from one another.
Kyle Van Deusen:So much of what we do as business owners in this industry in particular, very few of us went to school to run a business. Almost none of us started this business on purpose with a business plan. We built a website for a friend, and then somebody offered us money to build another one. And then poof, next thing you know, you own an agency. So you do a lot of this on an island by yourself, and you make it up as you go.
Kyle Van Deusen:So for me, the the information the power of all the information that you can collect is so helpful to everybody that runs an agency because you might say, I'm only charging $70 an hour, but the average across everybody in the admin bar is a hundred and $10 an hour. I should raise my prices. And if you didn't have a survey like that to tell you what everybody else is doing, it'd be really hard to do some of those things yourself. So I think there's a a huge amount of power in just understanding how other agencies are operating and what kind of revenue they're generating, what kind of tools they're using, what they're seeing success in, what's becoming more difficult. All of that is just really fascinating, and I think hopefully helpful to other agency owners.
Steve Burge:Is that something that drives a a large amount of new users? Are are there other ways in which you try to drive a large amount of new users and through sort of big launches such as your agency your agency survey? Or is it very much a not a grind, but a product of consistency that you have your schedule, boom, boom, boom, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? You you feel like you're growing through consistency, or are there some some big successful things you do that help the admin bar to grow?
Kyle Van Deusen:It's it's strange because I don't I don't ever set out really to do anything to grow the admin bar and never have. The Facebook group, we only allow in about 40% of the people who ask to join the group, and so this is based on some criteria we figured out and how they answer the questions when they go to join the group. So about 60% of the people who ask to join, actually say no to. So I'm I'm kinda stepping in my way of growing the community a whole bunch. So I don't know.
Kyle Van Deusen:I've I've always looked at the community as, like, the right people will come in and the size I mean, once we had 2,000 people in there, there was enough people for conversation. We were fine. So it was never a goal to, you know, have 20,000 people or 50,000 people. We have 11 or so right now. That's great.
Kyle Van Deusen:I'm sure that number will grow over time, but I've just never been, in it to grow it as big as possible. Now that limits revenue and all those kinds of things. It's probably not the wisest business decision I've ever made, but the quality of the group has stayed really consistent over time as I compare that to maybe some other communities that have taken a different approach. And I think part of that is is we're just real picky about who we let in. We're real quick to escort people out who don't behave appropriately.
Kyle Van Deusen:So it's just never been a goal of mine to grow it huge in the same way you might do if it was just a product you were selling.
Steve Burge:The admin bar is mostly focused on WordPress. Right? But there is a portion of it where I've seen discussions on Webflow and other platforms as well. I mean, the name is gives you options. Right?
Steve Burge:It's it could be something that could grow organically at a at a pace you're comfortable with, but it could grow perhaps beyond WordPress into a more general small agency niche?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I mean, that's certainly possible. It's always been built around kind of the things I was doing in my business. I spend all my time in WordPress, so those are the things I'm interested in talking about. WordPress has been weird in the last six or eight months.
Kyle Van Deusen:So, you know, things change all the time. We'll see where that goes. I'm definitely not you know, because I'm not just trying to blow the group up as big as I can possibly get it, it's not really a goal of mine. I'm not looking for ways to, like, maximize market share or anything like that. Like, I I don't use vocabulary like that too often.
Kyle Van Deusen:So, you know, I'm open to those things, but a lot of it's just, you know, the people we know and the people we've attracted. I think the wider you go with the, you know, the topic of the group, it's harder to have the real quality. When we've stayed focused mainly on WordPress, we have a lot of WordPress experts in there, which is really helpful.
Steve Burge:Are there specific problems that you see bubbling up in the group that you try and solve with your content? Things like site speed, Cloudflare, and security. I presume perhaps page builders as well. The ins and outs of I think a lot of these agencies tend to standardize on a platform. So choosing a page builder is a a big choice for them because then it might influence their next hundred site builds, for example.
Steve Burge:Are there particular problems that you see bubbling up and then you try and create content for?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I mean, my I've never really set out to say, okay. You know, what problem can I go out there and figure out, solve, and then share? It's more like, what problems am I experiencing? What did I figure out?
Kyle Van Deusen:And now if I figured something out, let me share it. I happen to run into a lot of the same problems everybody else does, so that works really well. A great example of that would be care plans, which is managing people's WordPress websites. It's something most WordPress agencies do. It's it's one of those things that can be a tough sell if you don't position it great with clients.
Kyle Van Deusen:It's really easy to position it like a insurance plan or like an extended warranty. And clients aren't really excited about buying an extended warranty or an insurance plan. So me and my buddy figured out a way that we could position the care plan in a more creative way that made it more attractive to clients. We tested that a bunch ourselves. We turned it into a product, and we sold thousands of copies of those, thankfully, and helped a lot of other people grow their recurring revenue because project revenue, anytime you're in a service business like this, can be so up and down.
Kyle Van Deusen:This month, I have a bunch of sales. Next month, I'm busy completing all that work. So I have no sales, and it's kind of a roller coaster up and down. And the monthly recurring revenue kinda helps streamline that and raise the floor of what you're gonna earn in a month. So figuring out ways to help people sell care plans is something we started doing seven years ago, and I've published a blog post on it within the last week.
Kyle Van Deusen:So that's a pretty good example of something.
Steve Burge:So, Kyle, you find that perhaps a a majority of your the agencies you work with are trying really hard to get people on these care plans. I I know from experience some of the agencies that I've talked with would maybe even roll in the initial cost of the website build into the care plan. So instead of charging $3,000 upfront, they might be charging, say, 400 a month over three years. So it's much cheaper upfront for the customer, and they get the benefit of a care plan as well to keep the site updated.
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I think everybody's trying to get as much recurring revenue as possible. Just have predictive income. You know? You leave a full time job where you get the same paycheck every week, and you become an entrepreneur, and you don't know how much you're gonna make this week versus next week or this year versus next year.
Kyle Van Deusen:So anything you can do to bring in predictable income is really important, and people have done it all kinds of ways. Like, you're describing kind of rolling the entire website into a monthly fee is a has been a very popular way for people to do it. All of these ideas have pros and cons to them, you know, so it depends on what your appetite is for trying to get a client to continue paying monthly invoices for three years until you're made whole. Sometimes that can be more difficult than others, but there's all kinds of ways to do it. And and most people are focused on ways to find recurring revenue in their business, whether that be care plans.
Kyle Van Deusen:I think it's the most obvious for WordPress businesses, but marketing activities, SEO, paid ads, all those kinds of things can be sources of recurring revenue as well.
Steve Burge:Is this a a business model that is maybe not threatened, but changing at the moment with AI, website building tools getting easier? Is there a sense of concern or a sense of change among your audience at the moment?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I mean, I remember when when ChatGPT really first hit the scene, that was all my mastermind communities talked about for two
Steve Burge:months Oh, really?
Kyle Van Deusen:Essentially, wondering if we had to close-up shop at this point. Now I think the initial hype around that has died down some, but there's no doubt that, you know, I use ChadGBT every day to help me with my business. I think the agencies that are gonna struggle with that transition the most, and every business goes through this, technology disrupts every industry eventually. You know? I think the agencies are gonna struggle with that the most are the ones that are selling the most low end products.
Kyle Van Deusen:Right? So if they're selling templated websites, the The U the the website owners putting in all their content, they're not doing any strategy or marketing or things like that. AI is catching up with what you can do on that kind of project really quickly. Now the people that are doing a lot more strategy focused stuff, custom designs, content creation, all those kinds of things, it's gonna be a whole lot harder for AIs to replace that immediately, but never say never. We never know.
Kyle Van Deusen:You know?
Steve Burge:Well, do you see that heading in any
Dan Knauss:particular directions for your audience? I I've been wondering as as people are who haven't traditionally done app development more back end work, you know, with like Maderos and and others suddenly working with AI tools to produce produce some apps, get some interesting work done. Do you do you think there might be like a logical opportunities where especially if you had clients a long time to really get into more of backend integration because you have that relationship already and you know how a business operates. Are you seeing that happen at all? Are there anything else that might surprise us as what comes next?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I mean, I think the the biggest advantage right now is we can use this in our own business to make ourselves more efficient. You know, I can I can have ChadGBT proofread something before I send it out, or I can get a second pair of eyes or a second opinion, even if it is a robot, that's can be really helpful? I've also been able to build things that I wouldn't been able to build before for my client. So woulda had to tell them no, or we woulda had to spend a whole bunch more money.
Kyle Van Deusen:And, thankfully, AI tools have been able to help out with that. So I think there's opportunities out there everywhere. I I don't think at this point there's any running from it and saying, I'm just not gonna use those AI tools. You know? I think we're all gonna have to embrace it.
Kyle Van Deusen:You know? I I have watched clients try to use technology. I'm not too scared of clients going directly to AI to build entire websites, not the kind of clients that I want to hire me anyways. So I think we're a little ways away from that. But us as agency owners being able to utilize those tools and know how we can put those into practice for our clients effectively, I think there's gonna be tons of opportunity there.
Steve Burge:It's been an interesting fit for us at at Published Press with AI that all our developers use it just to ask questions, to to bounce thoughts back and forth of someone that might be able to give them some useful feedback. They got questions. Not to write the bulk of code, but certainly on a day to day basis to often provoke a thought or provoke an idea. But on the product side, we've really struggled to find any good use cases inside WordPress. I mean, there's there's a ton of content creation plugins that, of course, spit out a 50 blog posts for you using ChatGPT.
Steve Burge:But when we sat down and thought about it hard, actually using AI inside WordPress, replacing some tasks, there's not that much that AI might be able to do yet. Example, we've got a slideshow plugin called Metaslider, and someone asked me the other day if anyone had ever asked us to to generate AI images for slideshows. No. Not once. Never.
Steve Burge:People want their stuff that they have carefully created and looked after, put on the website, and the same is content. People don't really want AI content, at least the people that me and you are dealing with perhaps. That AI has its uses, but also has big spaces where it's not particularly useful, I think.
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I I'm definitely not a fan of just, you know, asking ChatGPT to write a blog post for you then copying and pasting the content. I don't like reading articles like that, so I don't wanna publish articles like that. But there's all kinds of things that I have used ChatGPT in for content production, so ideas for, you know, internal links on my website. Hey.
Kyle Van Deusen:I just wrote this blog post. You already know a bunch about my website. What could I link this to? Or taking a blog post that I've written and say, okay. Help find all the FAQs I kinda just answered naturally in this post and format them as FAQs, and I'll stick them down at the bottom.
Kyle Van Deusen:Or, you know, help me write a, you know, a too long, didn't read section for this. So there's things like that that have been really helpful that I could very well do on my own but would be time consuming and aren't super high value or critical to the piece of content being good or not good. But, you know, it's like having a a virtual assistant, you know, but it's it's a AI assistant, essentially. So there's been things like that that have been really helpful. Another thing I've tried to work with it on is, like, publishing schedules.
Kyle Van Deusen:So a lot of the analytics, platforms, YouTube will show you when most of your people are online or when you got views for a video. So trying to get AI to help me, like, you know, if I schedule this at 4PM instead of 12PM, would I, you know, get more visitors on the page? So things like that that maybe I could do through a lot of analyzation, I don't have to do because ChatGibouti can help me out on it.
Steve Burge:And and you're using it in the agency as well. You're actually building some WordPress plugins perhaps or some integrations using AI?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. So I did create a plugin 99% with AI, just for fun to see if I could do it just to scratch my own itch, not as a commercial product or anything like that. But I've definitely used it with client projects on, like, okay. I'm not sure exactly how to do what they're asking me to do. I I don't write PHP.
Kyle Van Deusen:I don't write JavaScript. So if you ask me any questions that involve having to do that, I'm kind of out of luck on that. But, you know, for some simple things that, you know, I could verify or, you know, double check with somebody who does understand that, I don't I don't mind implementing solutions like that, and it's definitely got me out of some pickles before. So that's that's been a great great help. So you have a
Steve Burge:a content creation process. You use, like, Google Docs or Notion or something. Or in are you writing inside WordPress?
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I write almost everything in Notion. For a long time, it was Google Docs, but me and organization in Google Docs has never gotten along. It's just a giant list of every document. I'm trying to search for stuff.
Kyle Van Deusen:So that's never worked well. So, really, I started getting into Notion because I could create databases in there, tag information, assign it to certain projects, all those kinds of things in in more creative ways. I'm a huge Airtable fan, so I use Airtable to run a lot of things inside my agency. And the Notion databases that were that are built into their work in a similar way. So I just started using that as kind of my, you know, content hub.
Kyle Van Deusen:So every newsletter, every blog post, every script for a YouTube video, it's all in Notion. Most of them are tagged appropriately, but they're pretty easy to find. Copying and pasting out of Notion works pretty decent into WordPress. You know, some some things better than others, so it does an okay job. Google Docs doesn't always do a good job of that either.
Kyle Van Deusen:So I found Notion to be a pretty good place for all that, and it just helps keep me more organized.
Steve Burge:Oh, so your process would look something like create the content in Notion, copy paste it over to WordPress, tidy it up, then maybe there's some AI tools that you can use inside WordPress to automatically cross link to other posts or maybe add the too long, didn't read section, and then and then it's time to hit publish.
Kyle Van Deusen:That's it. You know? And and there's often, you know, when I'm writing a Notion, I can't think of a good analogy or, you know, I need a different word because I've said the same word seven times. So it's kinda Chad GBT has replaced my thesaurus and things like that, you know, because you can bounce ideas off of it. So it's pretty handy to have during that part of the process as well.
Steve Burge:So do you have a a plan, a a road map for what comes next for the Abimba?
Kyle Van Deusen:I don't. It's it's
Steve Burge:Step by
Kyle Van Deusen:step. So so by the seat of my pants. No. I'm lucky if I know what's gonna happen next week. Two weeks in advance, I'm really doing good.
Kyle Van Deusen:So I keep a big log of content ideas. We have some things because I like a schedule. We have some things that we do at a certain time of the year, so I know what things are coming up with that. But a lot of it is kind of, you know, reaction to what's going on in our space, what people are talking about in the community. I tend to do much better work when I'm inspired by something.
Kyle Van Deusen:So sometimes it's somebody ask a question in the group, and I'm like, oh, I think I have a really good answer to this, and I'll turn it into a piece of content somehow. So not a whole lot of big plans. I'm not a good big picture guy, but more of the same, hopefully.
Steve Burge:Okay. So basically, a a virtuous cycle of listening to your users, producing content based on what they tell you. And perhaps the quicker that cycle is, the happier they are, the more the more likely they are to recommend the admin bar. If if they post a question in or ask ask a question in a mastermind group and suddenly you have a video on that seven days later, that's gonna be someone that's gonna love and recommend the admin bar afterwards.
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I get called out because we'll have discussions in our mastermind groups, then the next week's newsletter is about that exact topic, and they'll write me back and say, was this from our conversation? I'm like, yep. Grabbed inspiration from that. So that's that's a huge part of it is just what's going on in our community, and where can I lend my thoughts or where can I find somebody?
Kyle Van Deusen:You know, we're doing a we've done a weekly series three years in a row. So the first year was on accessibility where we had Amber Hines. She came in and wrote an article every week on accessibility. The next year, we did it on security last year and then this year on SEO. So if I can bring in experts that know a whole lot more about these topics to share information, that's great as well.
Kyle Van Deusen:So anywhere we can find the right people to to bring in the answers or a perspective is great for me.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. I'll tell you it works really well. I think just a week ago, stumbled over some, something Oliver had written recently for you about European legislation and some very specific new things. I think I was actually reading Oliver elsewhere and trying to see who else had covered some of these topics and and admin bar came up there. So definitely works.
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. I'm not gonna tell these people that are donating weekly blog posts to the admin bar how well they're ranking because they'd be really sad that they weren't putting it on their own website. So we'll just keep that between us.
Dan Knauss:I think it's I think it's that drawing in the expertise that really works well. It's it's there's a reciprocity in there. Yeah, if you don't know who they are, then you find out. Connecting people with those experts is just really great for the ecosystem and the community.
Steve Burge:So Dan, in this case, Oliver Silde is the CEO of Patchdoc? Yes.
Dan Knauss:And founder for Patchdoc, which I'd say is one of the premier security organizations working in WordPress, but they're broader than that. They're gonna branching out as a unique open source operation there. What's the what's the term when they're able to create actually log vulnerabilities there, CBA. And if if they log it, it goes into the system. Everyone knows about it.
Dan Knauss:They're finding a lot of a lot of bugs and helping people proactively fix their software, branching out into Drupal, things like that.
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. And and from our community, for most of us, security is just a dark art, and we don't understand any of it. Just tell me what button to press to keep my website safe. And Oliver just I mean, he could rattle off things that would blow our mind, you know, all day. So working with him, he ended up producing, I think, 50 pieces of content last year for the admin bars website just on questions people have about security or, you know, the nitty gritty about things.
Kyle Van Deusen:And they're all pretty brief articles. I would say, you know, 500 ish words is kind of where we tried to keep them. So not with SEO in mind whatsoever, which is interesting. The accessibility, the SEO, and the security articles we've done, none of them are SEO optimized, but all of them have gotten really, really, good traffic and and good rankings. So that's been huge and, kinda changed my perception about how to optimize something for SEO.
Kyle Van Deusen:I think relevance is more important than we think it is and more important than word count for sure. But it was just great to have a community that's asking questions and then an expert there that could answer those questions, you know, and try to filter that through you know, we gotta have Oliver dumb things down a little bit for us. You know? So that was that was kinda my role in that. It's like, wait, Oliver.
Kyle Van Deusen:I don't understand any of this. You're gonna have to talk to me like I'm five.
Steve Burge:Well, you've got to the point with the admin bar being big enough that someone like myself kinda feels like I need to be in there because people are asking questions about published press or meta slider or something else we do, and I need to be there to monitor it and ask if they have a quick okay. I'll let that part out. And I need to be there to answer if they have a question. Yeah. You just when
Kyle Van Deusen:you when you ask to join, you better answer those questions because only 40% of people get in, and I might have to deny you. You know? I'd hate to do that.
Steve Burge:And so agency owners and people that own WordPress related products.
Kyle Van Deusen:Yeah. There there's a mix of people. I would say the bulk of everybody. And based on our survey, there's a lot of freelancers. There's a lot of, like, agencies of one.
Kyle Van Deusen:There's less bigger agency owners. You know? But there's people that work in, you know, hosting companies. There's people that own products. We have people join that are making their first blog for fun as, like, a little side hustle.
Kyle Van Deusen:So there there is a range of people in there. I just like to make sure that the people that join are you know, they are at least interested in WordPress, and that's what they're there for. We're real big on not doing a lot of self promotion, so we don't allow people to come in and just promote their own products. So you you can definitely tell some people that request to join the group, they're coming there to make sales. You know?
Kyle Van Deusen:So those people usually don't make it in.
Steve Burge:So final question for you. You're deeply involved in the WordPress community, but this doesn't have to be a a WordPress answer. We call it our blog roll question. Is there a a publisher, someone who's creating content of any form, whose newsletter or blog posts you get really excited to see at the moment? Is there anyone who's really creating good, interesting content that that catches your eye?
Kyle Van Deusen:And so I watch a ton of YouTube. I'm a YouTube addict. So I, mostly, like, food related stuff. If you can't tell, I'm a physique, I also enjoy food. But I think I might have give you a WordPress answer on this one, and that's, Ray Morrie at the Repository.
Kyle Van Deusen:Writes a newsletter, has a blog. She's a real journalist. You know? So these are you know, what I'm writing is just like an agency owner who can type. She's an actual journalist writing very credible information, doing the research and all that.
Kyle Van Deusen:So every time, you know, I believe it's Fridays when her newsletter comes out, I'm always devouring that newsletter and stealing ideas. I I wish I could've caught her before she started this and tried to hire her for the admin bar because I just absolutely love it, and she's doing an awesome job.
Steve Burge:Yeah. She was on the podcast with us a few weeks ago and had had experience sitting down with high level politicians and people that were real movers and shakers in Australia. I think we asked her, does it intimidate you having to deal with people like Matt? She's like, not really. I've dealt with people equally powerful before, and they put on their pants one leg at a time just like everyone else.
Kyle Van Deusen:She's awesome. I I haven't got to connect with her personally yet, but I'm looking forward to that because I I definitely think a lot of her.
Steve Burge:Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kyle. I know you don't think too far ahead, but I wish you good luck and all the best with whatever you do come up with next for the Abimba.
Kyle Van Deusen:Well, thank you. I really appreciate you having me on.
Dan Knauss:Thank you.